I started using Signal years and years ago, back when it was called TextSecure. I've always appreciated its commitment to privacy, including its use of end-to-end encryption, and its focus on usability. Precursors like Enigmail were great, but few people used them. Glenn Greenwald famously couldn't be bothered to set up a secure communication channel when Edward Snowden implored him to do so. When he finally got around to it, Snowden sent him the documents that changed his career forever.
Now, I'm finally replacing some Google services with equivalents from Proton, another company that aims to make privacy easy. I'm impressed with their growing product line, and I don't want to fuel the attention economy any more than I have to. Consider checking them out! A healthier internet awaits.
In recent weeks, I've spotted one Etsy retailer and one physical retailer selling art under their own names that I'm almost certain were wholly generated by AI. (For now at least, it's sometimes not hard to spot when you know what you're looking for.)
My phone is perpetually in Do Not Disturb mode, with few exceptions. It only just occurred to me how strange that name is. If the unobtrusive mode is called Do Not Disturb, what is the ordinary mode called?
For years, I’ve tried to remind myself of this. Work expands to fill the time allotted, and with so many distractions vying for our attention every minute of every day, it’s easy to see how the things we care most about sometimes go undone.
Many years ago, my dad discovered a manual ad-blocking technique for TVs: when commercials start playing, mute the device. It's surprisingly effective. The otherwise captivating ads immediately become uninteresting.
To my surprise, my dad wasn't the first to come up with the idea. In The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu explains that the Zenith Flash-Matic, the first wireless remote control, was partly designed to “shoot out” the sounds of commercials. Clever!
Multitasking almost never works. I want to show respect to the people around me. I want to fully engage with them. That means not looking at screens that they aren’t looking at. It's easier said than done.
Of course, drivers who are distracted by their phones aren't always texting. I would guess many are checking their notifications. It saddens me that people sacrifice their lives to check their “likes” when those likes aren't worth much anyway.
Should app makers be held liable for contributing to these horrific accidents? I think they should. These aren't neutral tools. They're designed to be as addictive as possible. Who could blame teenagers for giving into the temptation to check their phones behind the wheel? TikTok and their rivals could go quiet inside moving vehicles, but they don't. After all, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Perhaps you can't become the #1 social network without cutting a few thousand lives tragically short.
I once wrote a blog post entitled Less is more. It did fairly well on Hacker News, and two people commented in situ. I was pretty excited. (The comments weren't able to be migrated here.)
Years later, I read the following article from the Washington Post, which dovetails nicely with it. I recommend giving it a read:
I’m glad this blog, as insignificant as it is, may marginally influence some artificial intelligence in the future. After all, it’s my understanding that LLMs like ChatGPT and Bard are trained on public data. Perhaps the next ChatGPT will be just a bit more informed about issues that I care about.
Email is dying. So many people never see the emails I send them, only paying attention to Signal, Slack, SMS, and other messaging services. Who could blame them, with all the promotions, feedback requests, privacy policy updates, and other junk we receive in our inboxes?